


Time Moves Slow

by umechaw



Series: Until the Dust Settles, in the Same Specific Place [2]
Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Cloti - Freeform, F/M, Fluff and Smut, One Shot Collection, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Porn with Feelings, Tenderness, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:28:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25403104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/umechaw/pseuds/umechaw
Summary: "being with her was starting to feel less and less like a sucker punch"Cloud/Tifa oneshot collection
Relationships: Tifa Lockhart/Cloud Strife
Series: Until the Dust Settles, in the Same Specific Place [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1839856
Comments: 28
Kudos: 126





	Time Moves Slow

**Author's Note:**

> A series of oneshots set in the universe of my "Three Months, Tops" fic that I'll update when inspo strikes. Various ratings and tags will be added as I go. It's not gonna be in chronological order (will make it clear in the notes before chapters tho).  
> this first chapter is a literal plotless fluffy smutfest set a few months after TMT, I hope you enjoy!

**sucker punch**

* * *

Cloud doesn't get sucker punched.

What he _does_ get is a tactical advantage. The bar isn’t the biggest space to throw down in. There are at least fifty people here tonight alone, in the splash zone. Five of them decided they wanted their ass beat. Tifa has a zero tolerance policy for drunken violence and even though he is, emphatically, her bouncer, she'd hopped over the bar when the first bottle smashed.

An idiot comes swinging at him and hopped up on something that has his adrenaline through the roof, no concept of odds or how uneven they are. For the sake of making it quick - Tifa’s almost done mopping the floor with the others - he takes a hit, hard across the face. And then swoops down and up with a calculated punch to the kidneys that puts him on the ground instantly. Swept off the floor, thrown out by the collar.

Friday night. The usual.

Now, there’s a ruckus. A chorus of her most loyal patrons, cheering on the show, catcalling - he and Tifa walk in after sending them out on their ass and she ignores the room to get a good look at his face.

His cheek and brow bone smart, he takes her hand before it reaches his face. Her touch is like a dimmer for the rest of the world and for a brief moment it’s just her, the concern on her face, the heart beating in her chest, the sweat on the peaks of her shoulders.

“You okay?”

“It’s nothing,” he says. He puts a hand to her elbow. “Are you?”

“I’m good.” She smiles at him, tweaks his uninjured cheek. He thinks about kissing her, but her patrons are already in enough of a tizzy and he’s not quite sure what that would do to them. In fact, they both look around, remember where they are, and he takes two calculated steps away.

The moment has to pass. They have to fight to take reign in the chaos again, business as usual, and she decides to close early, anyway. The place is in shambles - a broken table, stool missing a leg. Shattered glass. Granted, it was a record short bar fight, but they’d still managed to make a hell of a mess.

"I can’t remember the last time I saw you get hit."

She holds an ice pack to his eye socket. The beginnings of blues and greens are already rising with the swelling.

It's hours later, some time past midnight. The bar’s cleaned and prepped for tomorrow's round, showers done. He’s in her bedroom, on her bed, letting her play nurse as she sits there in her underwear. His shirt is off. And he still thinks about these moments, that they’re as comfortable as they are. That it’s taken time, but now her room is slowly starting to feel like _theirs,_ and it’s an obvious choice. Lived in, warm, better mattress. Doesn’t squeak as much.

He just shrugs. "It’s a decent tactic, allowing an enemy to believe they have the upper hand."

"Cloud," she says, laughter in her voice, "it was just a bunch of drunk idiots."

He winces, places his hand over hers to adjust the pressure on his eye. "And they chose the wrong bar."

She smirks. He wasn’t wrong.

"This is gonna be an awful shiner," she tells him, lifting the compress so she can peek underneath. Swollen shut slightly, but not so bad quite yet.

“It won’t last.”

“It’ll definitely help with that tough guy rep of yours,” she teases.

He pictures her body-slamming a guy twice her size and wonders at her own reputation. She used to worry that involving herself in bar fights would lead to scared customers. Instead, she’d found, and wasn’t entirely sold on the trade off, mostly they just got super horny.

He doesn’t really blame them.

She’s a fucking powerhouse.

“Definitely won’t help with your pretty boy reputation, though.”

“Shame,” he mutters, trying not to blush.

She pulls the ice pack away to size him up with a very serious expression on her face. His legs are crossed and he tries not to make it obvious that he’s squirming.

The grave pout breaks out into a smile and she runs her cold hand along his chin sweetly.

“Hmmm, no. I take that back. You’re still gorgeous.”

He _does_ blush. Feels the heat roll up his chest.

“Your hands,” he says, as an excuse to move past it. He takes the cold pack while it’s still of any use and puts it on the back of her knuckles. She’s been flexing them since the fight, tender, aching. She hadn't had time to put gloves on. Somewhere, sobbing in their beds, there are multiple dumbasses nursing the fine imprint of her fist on their cheeks.

He likes it when she flirts, but he isn't the best reciprocator. He’s awkward. Tifa has enough charm for both of them, but just once he wants to tell her that he could watch her beat the shit out of scumbags all day, that she doesn’t have to do much at all, really. She just has to sit here like this in his shirt, smiling at him like that, nursing bruised knuckles, and he’s smitten.

He watches her lean over to put the ice pack on her bedside table when it has eventually melted. He’s of two minds about her, but by the time she’s settled before him again he’s got it figured out.

He takes her face in his hands, and her body language changes instantly. She leans forward, inviting. He slides both hands deep into her hair, and pulls her forward.

“You’re sexy as hell.” His voice is serious, low, and he isn’t playful like her, maybe he’s a little too blunt about these things, but it still surprises a heat onto her face.

She isn't any better, receiving compliments.

And they've been learning. Learning each other, bypassing the floodgate for a steady flow. Their lips meet slow, but deep. He presses so hard his lips ache and she has to inhale through her nose.

He kisses her for the sake of it but by the fourth time his tongue has indulgently mapped the fine corners of her mouth there’s a buzz in his stomach and he’s very interested in keeping this moving. He still feels the hesitation in his bones but he’s better now at being in the moment when he’s with her, and when he puts his hands on her knees he feels her spread them further, like an instinct.

She starts saying, between kisses, “Do you wanna…”

“Yes,” he says. She laughs. When he cups the underside of her thighs with a hard grip and yanks her into his lap she merely helps with the momentum.

He shoves the shirt up her body and she helps him with the rest, tossing it somewhere over the side of the bed, and he covers her bare throat in hot kisses and grabs her breasts, kneading, pushing them together, sucking one nipple into his mouth, and then the next, just to hear the the over-sensitive squeal at the edge of her breath because it turns him on so fucking much he can barely think straight.

She bends back to yank the pants down his legs and he does the rest when it reaches his knees, and before she can move to take her underwear off he stops her, recognises the pair. Black little number, so thin and sheer. He feels himself throb.

"Leave them on."

She smirks playfully, curiously, and does as he asks. Straddles him, pulls the crotch aside to expose her pussy. And he fists himself and slides the head of his dick along her until she’s flushed and wet. Her legs shift and then wrap around him, lock on his backside. Lazy kisses that are all teeth and tongue and the corners of mouths, sharing breath.

He keeps her close and they rock in tandem at first. The look on her face. Pupils blown to hell. It all still feels so fresh and new and unbelievable between them, but there's so much intimacy in their locked eyes and the way their noses keep brushing. And it builds, like lust.

And in all the time they've been pressed together they've created heat and sweat and there's a slick noise as he slides in and out of her, but he loves it, looks down at where their bodies meet, and he puts his hands across her back, splayed, fingers digging. He watches her as she starts getting herself worked up under his hot stare, rising and falling on him, and those high-pitched squeals come back to tinge her breath.

He can feel her lose momentum, seizing up. His hands drift to her belly immediately, to help her keep the pace and the deft twist of her body, snaps his hips to hers to make it easier.

She sobs at that, hands rising to her hair and grabbing fistfuls.

When he feels her come he takes control. He grinds up into her so hard it makes her gasp, and he eyes the underside of her jaw as she throws her head back, a collarbone that makes him want to weep, stuttering her breath, and she _shakes._ Fists her hair again, and he groans at how tight and hot she is, how good she feels.

She finally comes down, face hiding behind her hands, still trembling. He relaxes, eases back. Even though his body still wants to go _very fast,_ she’s holding herself there, shaking, hiding her face. She needs touch, comfort, after an orgasm like that. He slides his hands up and down her spine and pulls her flush to him.

“You okay,” he asks her, kissing her shoulder, her jaw, still marvelling at these smaller intimacies, wondering if it’ll ever stop feeling unworldly.

She nods, face buried into his neck. And it only takes mere minutes of this as she pulls herself back together.

They’re learning. Power dynamics. The do’s and don’ts. Sometimes it’s mutual, flustered and desperate. But sometimes he just likes to see her beg. Sometimes she likes control. In that respect, they’re clashing tonight. When Tifa puts him on his back with a firm shove he lands with a quiet ‘oof’, and she doesn’t even ride him at first, just tight little jerks of her hips until he's desperate. And she keeps touching herself, starts at her thighs, pulls on the thin elastic strap of her underwear to snap it back against her skin as her hands go heavenward. She palms her breasts and tugs on a nipple and moans at herself.

He can't help himself. His hands find their way to her hips, begging for something faster, and she promptly takes his wrists and pins them back at his sides.

"Eyes on me," she whispers, kissing him, faking out at the last moment to instead draw a line across his ready, parted mouth with the tip of her tongue. "That's all."

 _Fuck_ , he thinks, as he watches her mouth curl around a breathless, self-satisfied laugh, sliding her manicured nails up and down his stomach and his muscles twitch out of control. He’s mesmerised by the jut of her hip bones, the flexibility of her body, the mind boggling physicality of it all is still a lot to wrap his head around but he doesn’t shy away from it, not like he used to. He doesn’t take his fucking eyes off her. And he hears himself, outside of himself, panting. His fists clench and unclench through the eagerness and settle for resting on her knees.

"Touch yourself for me,” he asks, ragged, staring down at the black panties, yanked to the side to accommodate him, sliding along the side of his cock, and, gasping, she does as he says and starts playing with her clit. He's caught up between watching her touch herself and the way he’s thrusting in and out of her and her face, beautiful and open, hair stuck to the corner of her mouth, lashes fluttering.

When her pace picks up, it’s a mercy. He could have laughed, instead he throws his head back to stare at the ceiling with an exhale of relief and tries to roll his hips in time to hers and, almost like it’s a reward for his restraint, she starts bouncing up and down on him. And Cloud doesn’t get sucker punched, though sometimes when he’s at the whims of Tifa he couldn’t think of a more apt comparison. His orgasm rolls through him so hot and so fast it feels like tumbling. He pulls her down to him. Loses all sense, just the feeling of her and every nerve ending going haywire. He cries out, caught between her breasts and his throat, low and hard and desperate as he tries to get as close as possible. He holds her so tight as his dick twitches and spills, one long thrust. And then he's spent, and shivering, breathing deeply.

They stay like that for a long time. He can feel her stroking the hair out of his face and mindful of his black eye. He lightly runs the back of his knuckles up her arm, up along her cheek to curve around her smile.

He squints, and glances at her alarm clock. It's day twenty-five, of this. Of her. He squints, and thinks to himself. Was it? Maybe he's starting to learn that he doesn't have to keep counting the days. Maybe it didn't matter. Maybe time was starting to finally become irrelevant.

And maybe sometimes he still can’t wrap his brain around it, but he thinks that his life with Tifa is starting to feel less and less like a sucker punch.


End file.
